James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.

Baldwin's essays, such as the collection Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore racial, sexual, and class matters in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America, and their inevitable if unnamable tensions with personal identity, something taken for granted, uncertainties, yearning, and questing.